Copied from Sunday, December 12, 2010 Travel Blog

Monday, Dec 6th Papa John's pizza!

Today was a very quiet day in the hotel for us, but it was really nice just to have some down time.  After being in the room for most of the day though we were feeling a little cooped up and thought the kids needed to get out for a bit.  We put on our shoes, grabbed our jackets and headed out the door! 

The Ramada from across the street.

We had always ventured left out of the Ramada but this time we decided to be really daring by heading right – brave aren’t we? :) We walked around the corner of the hotel and down the road a bit where we saw a walkway over the road that would take us to the other side.  I wanted a good picture of our hotel so we crossed over.  Picture taken, we decided to keep walking down the road and came to a dvd/cd store and went inside.  We spent about 10 minutes looking around and decided on a dvd about Guilin, China where Kevin had visited with his brother, Brad, in 2006.  We also purchased 3 music CDs with traditional Chinese music on them.  We paid about $1.75 for each one of them.

On the way back to our hotel we stopped in at a different bakery.  Inside the bakery were two men who were from England.  They were in China teaching some classes.  Kevin talked with them for a bit, but they weren’t overly friendly.  In fact, on the way out Laurel whispered to me that she thought she heard them say that Americans were dirty!  Hmph.  (Do you think he knew I have been washing all of our clothes in the tub in the hotel room???)

One of the bakery workers made up for them though - while picking out some yummy baked goods one came up to me, pointed to her eyes and said, “You have pretty eyes.” and smiled.  That was so nice of her!  I thought later that I should have shown her Kevin’s eyes – wouldn’t she have been surprised with his two different colored ones! (When we first met, I could never remember what the right color of his eyes were!  It took me awhile before I figured it out!)

One of the side streets we went on.  I think we were searching for Snicker bars!

Back at the hotel we munched on our baked goods and then got a call from our guide, Vicki.  She asked how we were doing, and Kevin told her we were thinking about ordering pizza from… Papa Johns!  Vicki kindly offered to order it for us and have it delivered to our hotel room.  Yum!  It wasn’t our customary Friday night, pizza night but we could make an exception. :) 

Lots of delicious fruit!

Two large pizzas with pepperoni on one and green pepper, mushroom, onion and sausage on the other ran us 236 rmb, which is $35.81!  Chinese food in China is pretty inexpensive, but American food in China is really expensive!  It was worth every single bite though – and it was Lyric’s first taste of pizza.  We mostly gave her some crust, but she liked the cheese and sauce also.

With our belly’s full, we soon fell comfortably asleep.

Lyric going for the Sprite bottle.  No soda yet, Lyric! 

Here we are back at our room - look at the light making Laurel's hair glow!

This was what Laurel picked out - it was soft and spongy, pretty good - she had to share.